Big Government

Donald Trump, the developer and would-be presidential candidate, portrays himself as a swashbuckling entrepreneur, shrewder and tougher than any politician, who would use his billionaire's skills to restore discipline to the federal government. In his disdain of big government, however, Trump glances over an expensive irony: He built his empire in part through government largesse and connections. From his first high-profile project in New York City in the 1970s to his recent campaigns to reduce taxes on property he owns around the country, Trump has displayed a consistent pattern.

Re "The GOP discovers inequality," Opinion, Jan. 22 The usually insightful Doyle McManus describes how Republicans have begun to shift their message, if not their actual practices, toward acknowledgment of the bitter harvest of inequality. At the same time, he writes, the GOP is hardly ready to become the party of "big government. " Excuse me, but in the states and in Congress, the GOP has advocated for sticking government's fingers into women's bodies and into everybody's bedroom.

Re "Obama's 'idiot' defense," Opinion, May 21 Jonah Goldberg says the White House faces three scandals not because of lying but because a government "that takes on too much will make an idiot out of anyone who thinks there's no limit to what it can do. " His examples don't support this. It appears that the IRS office tasked with evaluating applications from groups seeking tax-exempt status had been left almost on its own due to cutbacks. The office needed more help, not less.

Among our readers, Randy Pope might be among the least popular non-L.A. city politicians in California. The conservative city councilman in the Bay Area suburb of Oakley, according to Times reporter Mark Z. Barabek's article on Wednesday, shuns partisan politics and prefers to focus on local quality-of-life issues. But it was the way he articulated his conservatism and his aversion to big government -- saying, "I can't choose which toilet I want to put in my house. I can't choose which light bulb I want to illuminate my living room.

"The Hunger Games," the teen action-adventure film that is opening to big numbers this weekend, is, without question, a parable of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It's also a cautionary tale about Big Government. And undeniably a Christian allegory about the importance of finding Jesus. Or maybe a call for campaign-finance reform? Like the Suzanne Collins bestseller on which it is based, the movie about a teenage girl fighting for her life in a televised death match in a dystopian post-apocalyptic country that has replaced America has a whiff of political content.

As politicians at every level continue to make promises to do everything for everyone, I can't help but be reminded of what Gerald Ford once said: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." GERALD M. BRONSON Sherman Oaks

Re "Anti-'Government' Feeling Is a Luxury for Americans," Commentary, Aug. 27: Matthew Miller implies that if the federal government were reduced as the Republicans want, America would end up with Third World conditions not unlike what we see in Turkey, where lax enforcement of inadequate housing codes contributed to the recent tragedy there. But who are the Republicans who are calling for the rescission of safe housing codes? Even more, where are the ones who, as Miller insinuates, want to do away with clean water, clean air, safe food and disease control?

Why doesn't someone put a lid on columnist George Will? His arrogant mouthing-off leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It is obvious that this bespectacled invective-hurler is the greatest fan of Big Government since F.D.R., yet he calls himself a conservative. In his Jan. 16 column, Will whines that under Gramm-Rudman, " . . . not much government will remain: No FBI , no Coast Guard." He has the gall to say of the plan by which bureaucrats will automatically invoke budget cuts, "What in the name of Jefferson has to do with the due process of democracy?"

President Bush, who came to office pledging to complete the Reagan revolution against big government, is set to preside over one of the biggest government undertakings in recent U.S. history -- the reconstruction of the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast. In doing so, the president is turning to many of the New Deal and Great Society programs that he long criticized as too costly and a threat to Americans' sense of self-reliance.

Earl Hutchinson's Viewpoint ("In Defense of Big Government," Oct. 5) shows that the author has not researched the facts. The New Deal did little to alleviate the Great Depression. Former President Franklin D. Roosevelt's economic policies were of little benefit to anyone, and the taxpayers are stuck paying for them today. It was World War II that revived the U.S. economy. Hutchinson is correct that defense spending has been rising under the Reagan Administration, but he is incorrect in saying that spending for social programs is falling.

Re "Obama's 'idiot' defense," Opinion, May 21 Jonah Goldberg says the White House faces three scandals not because of lying but because a government "that takes on too much will make an idiot out of anyone who thinks there's no limit to what it can do. " His examples don't support this. It appears that the IRS office tasked with evaluating applications from groups seeking tax-exempt status had been left almost on its own due to cutbacks. The office needed more help, not less.

We got a good long look at the second-term edition of Barack Obama last week, and he's sounding more like Bill Clinton every day. It's not all that surprising. Over the last two years, Obama has turned repeatedly to Clinton for counsel. And Obama was a target of Clinton's advice even before he asked for it. In a 2011 book and a series of public appearances, the former president laid out a polite but biting critique of Obama's first-term stumbles. Warning No. 1, coming from the man who proclaimed (in his 1996 State of the Union message)

The complaints of congressional Republicans that President Obama's inaugural address sent them no bouquets and love letters show a lot of gall, given the history of the last four years. Obama's inauguration speech in 2009 was crammed with language about bipartisan cooperation and ending the political rancor in Washington and what did he get for it? First, he got Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell's declaration that the paramount priority of his caucus was to make Obama a one-term president.

Liberals and their media allies have argued that the political lesson of super storm Sandy is that it shows the value of big government , at least when it's working properly. They've also pounced on GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who said during one of the Republican debates last year that he'd send the Federal Emergency Management Agency's functions back to the states. (Romney's campaign said this week that he actually wants to keep FEMA; I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's simply a clarification or an event-driven flip-flop.)

Re "Evangelicals get behind Romney," Oct. 26 The fact that evangelical Christians have decided to back Mitt Romney because he supports "biblical principles" is alarming. This, then, would seem to entail the subordination of women and the exclusion of not only the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community but atheists and people of every faith but Christian. Like many Republicans, I believe in small government; however, a government that practices the biblical principles that give rise to misogyny and bigotry is very big government, plainly a Christian theocracy.

ABOARD THE ROMNEY CAMPAIGN PLANE - Florida Sen. Marco Rubio denied Saturday that he was comparing President Obama's policies to those of Cuba when he criticized the president at a campaign event for Mitt Romney. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, told supporters at a Pensacola, Fla., rally that Obama's recently released plan for a second term was a “picture book.” “Unfortunately there's nothing really innovative in that picture book,” he told the audience. “They're the ideas that have failed every time they've ever been tried.

With a great rhetorical flourish earlier this year, President Clinton solemnly declared that "the era of big government is over." But almost from that moment forward, Clinton has proposed a seemingly bottomless list of new government initiatives targeted at problems from teenage smoking to television violence to rising college tuition costs. Bob Dole, meanwhile, is rapidly escalating his efforts to brand Clinton as "an old-style, dyed-in-the-wool, big-spending liberal."

The president decides to resign three full years into his term so that the vice president will be eligible to succeed him and still serve two terms of his own. Clinton and Gore? No, Hoak and Honeycutt. Ev Ehrlich's "Big Government," a satirical first novel published last week by Warner Books, mirrors some of the real-life possibilities in crisis-charged Washington when a president steps down. But any similarities to the present day are purely serendipitous, Ehrlich says.

Every four years Americans are presented with different visions of the future and are asked to choose between them. This year, we've been told, the choice is between two conceptions of government: small versus big. The Republican presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan has promised to "restore" America to its "small government" past. Any vision of the future is built upon a certain understanding of the past. Although past and future are inextricably linked, we spend much less time evaluating candidates as historians than we do assessing their skills as fortunetellers able to predict the future.

In this country that claims to value hard-working middle-class families, the wealth of those families sank by 40% in recent years, wiping out all the financial gains average Americans had made since the early 1990s. A new Federal Reserve report released Monday shows that the median U.S. family saw its net worth fall from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010. Meanwhile, the rich keep getting richer. It might be enough to spark an uprising if not for the country song ethic that so many Americans live by. I was driving to the newsroom in L.A. this morning when a song by Rodney Atkins came on the radio.